Another milky morning in Central London and time to open all the windows to get some “fresh” air into the office. Lets face it: Life as a researcher in archaeology is usually not particularly exciting because the majority of our time is spent at our desks in front of a computer in more or less nice offices (Photo 1).

However, there are some of these days which make this job so much cooler and more exciting than any other job I can imagine: Sometimes these moments actually happen in front of the computers when you plot your results and they come out just the way you expected them to and you suddenly get the feeling to understand some patterns in (pre-) history. Quite awesome this deep history understanding!

Yet, many of those much cooler days are outside the office, when you go on field trips or archive visits or excavations. These can be nearby or at the other side of the planet – it’s always interesting to poke your nose into another archive whether an earthen or a shelved one.

Since last September I have been working in London for the UP-NORTH project (https://www.facebook.com/upnorth.archaeology/ ) at UCL Institute of Archaeology – a good position to be curious. London is a pretty nice place for archaeology: The non-stop (re-) building of the city constantly produces new finds and the density of other institutions working in the field or closely related to our field such as the British Museum, the Society of Antiquarians, SOAS, or the Royal Holloway creates an amazing diary full of lectures, workshops, presentations, and exhibitions. However, to earn a living work also needs to be done.

The UP-NORTH project is funded by the ERC and tries to understand the resettlement of northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 26,500-19,000 years ago) and the subsequent diversification of the behaviour of those human groups in the context of climate and environmental change. So our study period is the end of the Ice Age. In contrast to “classic” archaeologies that consider typo-technologies of material remains with the climatic and environmental indications from the site or from a larger surrounding, we try to directly connect archaeological remains with climatic and environmental analyses. We therefore use stable isotope analyses and aDNA on archaeological material. To put this in the larger context, the archaeological assemblages need a precise and solid chronology. We achieve this chronological position by dating the very same archaeological material. Yet, before any of this can be done, we need to know where the relevant archaeological assemblages can be found.

So my job in the last months was to poke my nose in other people’s research: I filled long spread sheets with information about radiocarbon dates, sites, and assemblages and contacted people to find out more about those assemblages: their actual whereabouts, whether they would fit our purpose (Which pieces are actually preserved? What is preserved of them? How good is the preservation really? How many pieces are there of an ok preservation?), and whether we would be allowed to sample the material. Thus, I spent most of my time reading PDFs or books about great archaeology and writing e-mails. Once some of this e-mail writing was done – I also got to visit archives with one or more of my colleagues to either have a closer look at the material or to already take the samples such as in fantastic Brno.

What I learnt from all this? That an important part of modern archaeology is basically team work. Everyone in our team has a different expertise so that together we can cover quite a large number of questions and methods. Furthermore, we work closely with our local collaborators who have the necessary insights in the material and the sites to help us make the best choices for sampling. Without a team effort modern archaeology is simply not thinkable.

Last Tuesday we had one of these team days out: Three of us visited Jersey to see what the earthen archives there are currently revealing in the #IceAgeIsland project of our UCL colleagues Matt Pope & Ed Blinkhorn, British Museum’s Beccy Scott, Southampton’s Andy Shaw, and Manchester’s Chantal Conneller – btw, again a team effort!

Most people outside archaeology think it’s exciting to travel so much – mainly because they mix it up with their travels to go on vacation. Well, it is nice and I won’t complain but let me tell you about my day out in wonderful Jersey – and decide afterwards whether you were willing to do this for some bones, stones, and rocks:

My day started with the alarm going off at 3.30am – I’m no early bird and getting up and awake to get going takes some time for me. So at 4.30am I could leave the house to catch my train to King’s Cross where *surprise-surprise* my train to Gatwick was cancelled. Londoners will smile because many, especially those living south of London, know this problem too well. However, at 5am in the morning this forms quite a problem in London because the Underground is not going before 5.27am from King’s Cross towards Victoria station where the Gatwick Express represents an alternative way to the airport. Yet, I got that tube and with some sprinting in Victoria Station and Gatwick Airport reached my flight at 7.20am to Jersey in time.

At Jersey Airport, me and my two colleagues plus a baby boy were picked up by Matt Pope, his daughter, and Chantal Conneller. After a short discussion about the plans for the day, we set off to Les Varines, a Late Upper Palaeolithic site that received quite some media cover last year when engraved schist plates were found there. Being in Matt’s car, we received a first introduction to the island, its politics, peculiarities (they still have a bailiff there! and a scarily large looter community), and most of all its geology. So in Les Varines we were already quite well prepared when Ed Blinkhorn overtook to give us an introduction into the sites history and more insights in the complex geomorphological developments at the site and how these can be read from the 3D recording of the archaeological finds. We had a look at the structures that were gradually excavated (Photo 2) and then Chantal showed us some of the lithic material that had come out there – exciting for all the lithic lovers among us… so Chantal, the baby boy, and me. Organic material is very rarely preserved on Jersey. At les Varines they found a few bones last year. Some of which seem not to be burnt and, thus, of some interest for our project. Yet the preservation seems rather poor but if we can date them and possibly determine the species by ZooMS, it would help UP NORTH as well as the Ice Age Island project. Les Varines is one of the most northern and certainly the most north-western outpost of the Late Upper Palaeolithic Magdalenian expansion. The people leaving the remains at Les Varines went up north and then west, only Final Magdalenian people related to the Creswellian went further into Britain. By the time we were leaving the site, a first group of tourist was already guided over the site – making people aware of their heritage and making archaeological knowledge public is also part of the job. As the day of Archaeology also proves every year.

Photo 2 Excavation at Les Varines (Photo: S. B. Grimm)

On Jersey we next got on the road again to visit Beccy Scott in her intertidal excavations at Petit Portelet. Although quite a bit too old for our project, raised beaches and the possibility to find pockets of clayey loessic sediments from the Middle Palaeolithic in the intertidal zones is quite amazing. Tide can make the sea-level fluctuate up to 12-15m at Jersey – that is very impressive! Especially since the land mass can increase significantly during a very low tide. However, excavating in this spot on the beach therefore means constantly keeping an eye on the sea! Well, and not wearing too fancy clothes… (Photo 3)

Photo 3 Excavators at Petit Portelet (photo: S. B. Grimm)

We had some nice lunch nearby and then set off to the north of the island where some Mesolithic sites were explored in the past years. Unfortunately, none of these findspots revealed organic material thus far. Their location on the steep northern coast is quite interesting, in particular, since the project also collaborated with geophysicists to explore the sea ground off shore this northern coast and found that many parallel and intersecting valleys exist in the granite forming the island. Walking through these steep valleys during periods of lower sea-levels must have felt a bit like walking through a towering, stone-made Manhattan. On these spots on top of the modern coast an overview over this labyrinth of canyons was possible (Photo 4). What we could see from this spot were also many cracks and caves in the steep coastal cliffs. These are not easy to be explored as we should also find out on our next stop: La Cotte. Likewise Petit Portelet, this famous Middle Palaeolithic site can only be reached during low tide – and then you have to climb over a more or less slippery boulder field. In the 19th century, people reached this site – as well as some of the north coast caves from above via ropes that they also needed to climb back up if they wanted to leave the spots in time before the tides came back up. I clearly preferred the boulder field. And it was quite a WOW-effect turning around the cliff corner over the boulder field and suddenly standing in front of gigantic granite towers that embraced the site (Photos 5a and 5b). I doubt that coming from above has quite the same effect. This site now has a really good organic preservation – alas, the sediment our project would be interested in was shovelled away in the late 19th / early 20th century. The Middle Palaeolithic is meanwhile comparably under threat – this time it’s the natural elements disintegrating the rock and the sediments and gradually letting them crumbling down and washed out to the sea. Archaeological field work is forbidden due to the potential dangers of falling rocks hitting excavators and protective measures are installed and constantly tried to be improved.

Photo 5 a (above) Marvel about the size of b (below) the La Cotte site (photos: S. B. Grimm)

We made our way back over the boulder field and beach just to see off Andy Shaw who was guiding a group of archaeology interested inhabitants to those outstanding towering granite columns of La Cotte. We got on our way back to the airport just in time to go through the security, have a little snack, and catch the plane back to London.

Mind you, I guess it is needless to say that after all this boulder climbing, heath and beach walking, site visiting, landscape learning, archaeology and geology talking I was quite shattered when I arrived back home at 10.15pm that night (this time without any serious trouble by tube or train). However, it was a gorgeous day out but I hope this little narrative will stop non-archaeologists from idealising out travels – even if they are little friendly visits as this one with lots of other chittery-chatter, they are work, not vacations! And thus on the next day we were also back in the offices… Yet with lasting impressions of a beautiful island, marvellous archaeology, and a big gratitude to our colleagues who took their time to show us around.

However, my days in the UP-NORTH project and in London are counted. In two weeks, I will have left the UK and by September I start a new position in northern Germany – so this time, I’m going up north and then east (more Hamburgian style for my fellow Lateglacial specialists). Yet, this leaves someone of you with the possibility to apply for my position (http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AOE765/research-associate/ ) and describe a day like mine -still different!- in the UP-NORTH project at next year’s Day of Archaeology!

Hi my name is Josie Mills, I’m an MSc researcher at UCL and am currently working on the Ice Age Island project on Jersey!

Our day on the Ice Age Island project (see here for more info) began bright and early as the team amassed to clean and tidy the base post our mid-dig party, sending off our first team of student volunteers, who leave the project on Saturday.

As our project is based in two places, one dig, one archiving, after breakfast I jumped into a car heading to Jersey Heritage Stores, where we are in the process of archiving some 94,000 flints excavated from La Cotte de St. Brelade in the 1970s (see here for more info).

Before the students arrived at the store I spent some time with Dr. Chantal Conneller looking through the collections from the North Coast of Jersey for evidence of Mesolithic stone tools. These collections are particularly fascinating because they span the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic but also have stone tools from the Mesolithic and Neolithic. It just shows the sheer importance of the North Coast of Jersey as an archaeological landscape, perhaps because of the wide clear view across the, now submerged, topography that would have existed throughout much of the Ice Age.

A view of the North Coast from Grosnez

Usually we have one student in the stores to get experience of the archive system and the bigger picture of how our re-organisation effort will allow the stone tools to be studied by location in the site, helping us to understand specific areas of activity and raw material use. Today we had two students Eloise and Stacey, who spent the morning writing new bags for artefacts and organising them into boxes.

UCL students Eloise and Stacey working in the stores

After lunch there was an earthquake, the biggest on Jersey for around 200 years – fortunately everyone and the site was fine!

Me with the large flint nodule at the Houge Bie geology museum

I rounded off my archaeological day with a visit to the geology section of the Hougue Bie Museum. Where I got to see a giant flint nodule dredged from the Casquet Reef, near Alderney, which is very exciting for my dissertation research based on flint provenancing in the Channel area.

It’s hard to grab time to write down what we’re actually doing in the white heat of a summer field season: my day began at 4.30 this morning when my husband finally rejoined me in my tent (post-sophisticated cocktail party) and I started to worry whether I had booked a tool store and portaloo to be delivered to a Mesolithic site on the North coast of Jersey today. We’re part of the Ice Age Island project, a three year project looking at the Pleistocene archaeology of Jersey. We’re investigating Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeology held in capture points around Jersey – coastal fissures, caves and inland valleys – in order to better understand changing hunter-gatherer archaeology throughout the now submerged Gulf of St.Malo. Our main field base is our excavation of a Magdalenian site of Les Varines, but my heart remains solidly Neanderthal, and I predominantly spent the day talking through raw materials from la Cotte de St.Brelade with Anne-Lyse Ravon from the University of Rennes. It’s never as simple as that, of course: I had to spend 45 minutes after our morning briefing waiting for my 2 year old daughter to wake up before I could get her dressed for the day, say good bye properly, and head off.

We lose half our student team tomorrow (witness the cocktail party last night) and it’s sad to think that, just as we’ve all pulled together as unit, we’re about to be broken asunder. The tents will go down, we’ll lose half our crack team, and new crop of wide eyed archaeological debutantes will join us. We took a lucky couple into the Jersey Heritage stores with us today, helping to sort through the 94,000 artefacts that Professor Charles McBurney excavated from La Cotte de St.Brelade. Alongside the field season, we are in many ways still dealing with his post-ex: doing all the things that, given the time and resources, he and his team would have done – refitting, detailed technological analysis, and attempting to source the material dropped by Neanderthals at La Cotte. Doing this allows us not only to reconstruct their behaviour within the site itself, but the complicated itineraries they followed as they moved around the landscapes of the Gulf of St.Malo. The coats of Normandy, Brittany and especially Jersey are rich in Neanderthal archaeology: there seems to be something about the contact between the modern terrestrial landscape and the drowned plain that makes this a favoured place for Neanderthals and their prey – and not simply because coasts provide capture points.

Anne-Lyse Ravon is an expert of the raw material used by Neanderthals on the Breton side of the Normano-Breton gulf: she’s been helping us identify and group the raw materials our Neanderthals have been collecting, and also helped us out today with refitting material. The Norman-Breton landscape made itself spectacularly felt at around lunchtime today when we were hit by an earthquake – and hour late they felt the same earthquake in Brittany along the same fault that structures the landscape of the offshore region.

This excitement over, Matt Pope and I were interviewed by Daniel West for a project he’s conducting into the different ways in which we study and talk about Neanderthals: I really enjoyed the experience – it’s always useful to reflect on how and why we construct the knowledge we share. My favourite question has to be “do you think about Neanderthals when you smoke?” (and this to two reluctant ex-smokers on a little excavation smoking holiday). That done, it was off to the Jersey Heritage Museum at Hogue Bie to view some more raw samples…tonight off to flight club to experience an authentic Jersey Meal of Bean Pot, Calvados, and Jersey Wonders. Best job in the world: I love this island!!!